The Internet is by far the largest, most extensive publicly available network of interconnected computer networks. The Internet has become an extremely popular source of virtually all kinds of information. Increasingly sophisticated computers, software, and networking technology have made Internet access relatively straightforward for end users.
As a result, on-line shopping is increasing. On-line shopping continues to evolve from a means of providing an easy way of accessing information on the Internet to a virtual marketplace. With the growth of on-line commerce, price comparison has become a dominant theme for making an informed purchasing decision for on-line shoppers. A simple form of comparison shopping would be sequential visiting the web site of various vendors and comparing prices, clearly a time consuming and laborious task for the shopper.
The on-line shopping has also penetrated the grocery industry, although the grocery shopping is characterized by many factors, for example, the freshness of the produce, the delivery cost, which are unique to the on-line shopping. In addition, the grocery industry is also facing the challenge of decreasing customer loyalty. The proliferation of flyers (also called preprints, inserts) in the daily newspapers is evidence of the consumers' desire for grocery deals. Proactive consumers, often called the prosumers, will plan their grocery shopping trips based on the deals advertised in the weekend grocery flyers. Therefore, the grocery industry continues to spend considerable resource producing these flyers on a weekly basis.
There are several existing comparison shopping web sites that identifies a best price for a single item, for example:
http://froogle.google.com
http://www.shopzilla.com
These sites, however, cannot automatically provide the best price for a list of heterogeneous items. They are essentially search engines that allow a shopper to enter a key word. In response to the shopper's query, the search engines return a set of corresponding web-based matches listing the vendors, or vendors' web sites that offer the desired items. The technology is based on a web crawler systematically accessing web pages by sequentially following hypertext links from page to page. The crawler indexes the pages for use by the search engines from information about a web page as provided by its address or Universal Resource Locator (URL), metadata, and other criteria found within the page. The crawler is run periodically to update previously stored data and to append information about newly created web pages. The information compiled by the crawler is stored in a metadata repository or database. The search engines search this repository to identify matches for the shopper-defined search rather than attempt to find matches in real time.
On the other hand, at the on-line shopping site of a retailer, for example at
http://www.amazon.com/
http://www.bestbuy.ca/home.asp
while a shopper can prepare a list of items for purchase, the price provided at these sites is the selling price for the product at that on-line shopping site and price comparison feature is only possible by sequentially visiting different sites. However, sequential comparison shopping can be inaccurate in that an individual shopper may not cover all the web sites offering the desired items, potentially leading to missed shopping opportunities such as lowest price, better quality or service and so forth.
Similarly, most major grocery store chains maintain an on-line presence, many of which also offer the ability to prepare a shopping list:
http://www.loeb.ca/
http://www.heb.com/welcome/index.jsp
Both grocery stores and third-party sites also post the weekly flyers
http://www.loblaws.ca/this_weeks_flyer.html
http://www.flyertimes.com/
Those sites, however, do not provide price comparison.
A known method describes steps of letting an online comparison shopping site create a purchase order for purchasing all items on a list. However, the method of finding a solution is limited to a dichotomic situation: either an optimal solution is found or it is not found, and if it is not found then the user is notified of failure. It also does not address any other variables which could be correlated to the price under consideration. Moreover, the method does not utilize more than one variable concurrently to reach an optimized solution.
There is, therefore, a need to provide a method and system that provides shoppers an optimized shopping list based on more than one variable which directly affect the shopper.